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Super-resolution imaging within reach

Physics Education 2019-07-24 v2 Applied Physics Instrumentation and Detectors Optics Popular Physics

Abstract

Although several optical techniques have been recently developed in order to overcome the resolution limit in microscopy, the imaging of sub-wavelength features is still a real challenge. In practise, super-resolution techniques remain difficult to build or are photo-toxic for the biological samples. However, microsphere-assisted microscopy has recently made super-resolution imaging accessible to scientists (e.g. optical metrologists, engineers and biologists). This paper presents an easy-to-implement optical setup to perform full-field and contactless super-resolution measurements of nanostructured media or biological elements. For this purpose, a classical microscope was enhanced by introducing a transparent microsphere. We show that this rather simple approach makes it possible to achieve a lateral resolution of 200 nm in air, i.e. the visualization of feature sizes of 100 nm.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1812.06776,
  title  = {Super-resolution imaging within reach},
  author = {Stephane Perrin and Keshia Badu and Paul Montgomery and Sylvain Lecler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.06776},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T06:44:33.893Z